I first met Alex in Nassau Bahamas when he was just learning to sail the Flying Sea monkey. I was navigating through the Anchorage in a dinghy when I passed a little red sailboat. In the back of that sailboat were Alex and Vanessa drinking rum out of a brown paper bag. I said to myself “those look like my type of people”. As luck would have it, Alex was going in the same direction as my crew and we embarked on an epic pirate adventure through the Exuma islands. The climax of that trip was the Great Iguana Incident of 2009. Several months later I got a call from Alex telling me he was in Puerto Rico and had just bought a new boat but he had no idea how to sail it. I reminded him that I wasn’t a very skilled sailor myself to which he replied “We’ll just get her out into the water and figure it out”. Our first night at sea in the boat that would become bubbles we crossed the Mona Passage, which is an unforgiving passage of water separating Puerto Rico from the Dominican Republic. Everything that could go wrong did, short of sinking. I’ll never forget the range of emotions I felt. I was genuinely in fear for my life, but every time another catastrophe happened Alex tackled it with the self-determination that carried him around the world. We ended up sailing the whole south coast of Hispaniola (Dominican & Haiti) and on up to Jamaica. I flew in to meet Alex several more times during his travels and had always imagined myself hanging out with him into our 80’s with a never ending supply of “You remember that time…..” stories. Although I don’t have him here to trade stories with anymore, I do have a lot to remember him by. In 2010 he introduced me to the girl that would become my wife and I have two beautiful boys and a happy family because of it. It’s great to see that had such a profound and lasting influence in so many other people’s lives.